Hidden Costs For Software Of The Month Club
Being a paid-up certified partner has its privileges, but the overhead is starting to really add up, which leads us to re-examine the original reason for becoming a member.
Being a certified partner means getting an early heads-up on new software tools and services, and generally has been a good thing for us and, no doubt, most of the other certified partners. But of late we’re beginning to wonder if trying to keep up has any measurable upside. Every month a new batch of DVDs arrive, with cryptic notes on what the package contains. Attempting to get a sense of what it all means is like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hydrant. There are only so many hours in the day, and the few billable ones become even fewer when assessing and cataloging these updates and such.
The demands of producing a monthly release increases inexorably, something that just about everyone in the business experiences sooner or later. Little by little, the release itself takes on a life of its own, with the worth or value of the contents of the release becoming secondary. How all this stuff can help the partner generate more sales, provide better service or improve their products isn’t clear.
One of the problems is that the width of the product mix becomes far wider than the natural expertise of individual partners, forcing them to do a triage of sorts on the monthly package. The partners have paid good money to be so, and the provider certainly doesn’t want to disappoint, much less loose a recurring revenue stream. A famous Russian once said that quantity has a quality of its own, and it is not difficult to see where this may well apply, consciously or not, in deciding what goes into these monthly partner packages.
We also noticed that some of the standard products get updates every month. This led to several questions about doing incremental updates instead of the whole enchilada, and wondering if the products being constantly updated were somehow unstable or if the provider is trying to be a VW instead of GM. If the former then liability issues become interesting, while if the latter then the provider is to be commended. Perhaps these things are a combination of the two.
We decided against having a librarian keep track of these monthly update packages. And we suspect that the provider could provide more value for any partner subscription by focusing on reliability and quality assurance, instead of using sheer weight to justify the subscription price. There are better ways of monitoring changes specific to our activities, and the increasing acceptance of open source makes the value of certification difficult to continue on the basis of demonstrable ROI.
Open Source is another issue, but it does have one thing very much in common with the partner packages we’ve been getting for all these years. The notes and such are written by techies, and their verbosity is exceeded only by their un-readability. What ever happened to the ’25 words or less’ discipline?
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